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Harvard College 

L>l3,ss 

Oration 



By 

Roscoe Conkling Bruce 

Delivered for the Class of 1902 in 
Sanders Theatie. June 20, 1902 




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Speech Publishing Company 
Washington. D. C. 



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THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Coptfca Recsived 

SE:^ 6 1902 

COPVRIQMT ENTITY 

Cl,A.sS ^XXa No. 
COP»Y 3. 



Copyright 1902 
BY George R. Gray 



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Class ©ration 

RoscoE CoNKi^iNG Bruce 

l\ yi R. Marshal, Ladies and Gentle- 
^^^ MEN,— Fellow Classmates— To-day 
we stand upon the threshold of a new world. 
Upon the world we leave we look with grat- 
itude ; it has taught us ** to dream no dreams, 
to tell no lies, but to go our way, wherever it 
may lead, with our eyes open and our heads 
erect.'' Upon the new world we look with 
some misgiving and yet, we know, its im- 
perfections are its glory. The new world 
differs from the old, but in the new world as 
in the old we shall be Harvard men; our lives 
shall possess integrity. We go to make our 
special parts of the new world contain the 
ideal of the old. 

The university ideal is carved upon our 
gates— ** After God had carried us safe to 
New England, and Wee had builded our 



houses, provided necessaries for our livli- 
hood, reard convenient places for God's 
worship, and settled the Civill Government : 
One of the next things Wee longed for, and 
looked after was to advance learning and per- 
petuate it to posterity : dreading to leave an 
illiterate Ministery to the churches, when our 
present Ministers shall lie in the Dust/' 
Those words define the Veritas that in 1643 
was inscribed upon the college seal and adopt- 
ed as the college motto. The perpetuity of 
truth, the enlargement of truth, the diffusion 
of truth among the people,— for these pur- 
poses has there so long existed at Cambridge 
a Society of Scholars. 

Guiding intelligence is the special gift of 
the university to the nation's life. Univer- 
sity men form a large and important part of 
the intelligence that in industry, politics, art, 
religion, shapes social opinion and directs 
social action. And, in these responsibilities 
we, my classmates, are to share. Men of 
exceptional opportunity, we are bound by 



august traditions to render exceptional ser- 
vice to the things in American life that tend 
toward perpetuity, enlargement, diffusion of 
truth. It is fitting, therefore, that I speak to 
you of the most manageable social appliance 
for these purposes, — I mean popular educa- 
tion. 

This deserves your interest because it min- 
isters to perpetuity of truth. The organized 
teaching of school and college, completing 
and reenforcing the unorganized teaching of 
environment, mainly accounts on the spiritual 
side for the web and tissue of civilized living. 
The great university with richly stocked libra- 
ries, and the little red schoolhouse with blue- 
back spelling books endow the present with 
the experience of the past. The elementary 
school perpetuates elementary knowledge of 
language and history and art and science. 
Now, our impressive civilization rests upon 
economic efficiency. The school for all the 
children of all the people should transmit a 
knowledge of all our fundamental interests 



from sawing wood to reading Scripture! 
Advanced knowledge is rendered permanent 
by secondary schools and higher institut- 
ions. By giving the exceptional man an 
exceptional education, they give the nation 
guiding intelligence. If our popular leaders 
are men of fragmentary education, they will 
land the people in many a ditch. The trained 
leader is able to induce the present to recruit 
its scouts from the past. Taught the lessons 
of the past, fitted to grapple with principles 
and to make plain the emptiness of sham, 
our leaders should be rendered responsive to 
sound ideals. From these secondary and 
higher institutions come the teachers of our 
schools and colleges. The need of teachers 
who have been taught, is keenly felt through- 
out our educational endeavor, from backwoods 
school to university. Higher institutions give 
us professional men. '*The real inventions 
and motive powers which impel society for- 
ward and upward," says President Eliot, 
** spring from those bodies of well-trained. 



alert and progressive men known as the pro- 
fessions. They give effect to the discoveries 
and imaginings of genius. All the large busi- 
nesses and new enterprises depend for their 
success on the advise and cooperation of the 
professions. ' ' 

And so, my classmates, by contributing to 
the excellence of popular education, we may 
contribute importantly to perpetuity of truth. 
Institutions whose high office is to give the 
already gifted advanced knowledge, profess- 
ional insight guiding intelligence, we, as 
college men, shall not willingly let die. We 
shall be able to offer the common school at 
least intelligent criticism and, if need be, intell- 
igent defence. In 1899-1900, $213,000,000 
were spent for our common school system, 
the value of public school property was 
$539,000,000, our school population was 
22,000,000. That this large school expendi- 
ture be wisely directed, that this great public 
property be well administered, that this army 
of young people be led to useful victories— 



these things are vital to the maintenance' of 
the American type and quality of civilization. 
Popular education contributes not only to 
perpetuity but also to enlargement of truth. 
Harvard University is the resort of specialists 
'*each prepared," as the President says, '*to 
push forward a little the present limits of 
knowledge ; each expecting to clear up some 
tangle or bog on the frontier, or to pierce with 
his own little search-light, if only by a hand's 
breadth, the mysterious gloom which sur- 
rounds on every side the area of ascertained 
truth." The enlargements of truth which 
issue from accumulated researches of obscure, 
laborious specialists largely determine mater- 
ial and intellectual progress. Who can esti- 
mate how much the prolonged series of 
investigations which made possible a Pasteur 
has enchanced human well-being? The un- 
iversity develops the specialist, sustains his 
researches, and thus promotes enlargement 
of truth, and extends the area of enlightened 
social action. Inventive genius, which has 



so incalculably enriched the man with the hoe 
and the man at the spindle, is, of course, no 
monopoly of university men. But the secret 
excellencies of ingenuity, as Milton would 
say, may b^ fetched out most surely by 
appropriate education of all the children of 
all the people. ''There is no extravagance," 
says a distinguished living economist, * 'there 
is no extravagance more prejudicial to the 
growth of national wealth, than that waste- 
ful negligence which allows genius which 
happens to be born of lowly parentage to 
expend itself in lowly work." 

In short, for our civilization to attain the 
utmost progress, brains must not be wasted. 
For the sake of enlargement of truth, we, as 
Harvard men, shall support any practicable 
measure for extending to the competent the 
means of development. Capacity for re- 
search or for invention is no less capacity 
because found in a New York tenement house, 
in the mountains of Kentucky, or in the cabin 
of a Mississippi cotton plantation. 



Popular education, I have said, rescues 
from darkness exceptional men,— a fact im- 
portant to perpetuity, enlargement and diffus- 
ion of truth. Diffusion of truth among all 
the people is, moreover, a fundamental duty 
of democracy. To China the fact that the 
masses of the people obscurely vegetate is a 
circumstance of bland indifference ; that, we 
hear, is what Chinese masses are for! In 
our American commonwealth where is the 
place for vegetating masses? Is it Massachu- 
setts, or is it Georgia? 

But, in America as every where else, theory 
and practice are not one. The nation does 
not sufficiently provide technical training. 
Of the 16,000,000 American citizens between 
the ages of fifteen and twenty-four less than 
one third of one percent are receiving instruct- 
ion in the arts and sciences which bear directly 
upon their occupations. By extensions of 
the industrial education, we may reasonably 
expect to aid importantly the work of reclaim- 
ing the submerged tenth in our great cities. 



lessening the drain from our farms by trans- 
forming drudgery into intelligent labor, inspirit- 
ing the mountain whites of the South, adjust- 
ing the Negro to a mercilessly competitive 
civilization, increasing the efficiency and 
happiness of American working men and 
working women, giving rich and poor a 
wholesome respect for work and workers, 
furnishing the Republic citizens of resource. 

Now, the facilities of secondary and higher 
education are tending to become tolerably 
adequate for the white population; but the 
proportion of colored persons enjoying such 
facilities, seriously less to-day than it was 
twenty years ago, is pathetically small. The 
white South and the black South are in inter- 
est fundamentally one ; the North and South 
are one. To uplift the prostrate black South 
is to uplift the whole South, and to uplift the 
South is to uplift the nation. To equip the 
black South with guiding intelligence is, 
therefore, a national obligation. 

Although the common school system has 



been strengthened each year, even the North 
Atlantic and the Western States now spend 
for the education of each person of school 
age for a whole year only fourteen dollars : 
but the child, black or white, poor or rich, in 
these states receives much more than three 
times what the white child in the South 
receives, and much more than six times 
what the colored child in the South receives I 
In the faith that a chance to learn is the divine 
right of brains; that it is wiser to fill the 
schoolhouse than the jail; that there is no 
bulwark of defense, against foes without or 
foes within, half so strong as a thinking and 
resourceful people; that democratic institu- 
tions are strong when the average citizen is 
strong, weak when he is weak,— in this faith 
our forefathers entrenched the common school 
upon the principle that all the property of the 
state shall educate all the children of all the 
people. 

I should be unfaithful to the facts, to my 
traditions, and to this occasion did I not say 



one word more of the weakest point in Ameri- 
can education, the provision for Americans of 
African descent. This building is a memorial 
to the Harvard men who served in the Civil 
War fighting for freedom and truth. Our 
Society of Scholars reveres the memory of 
its heroes and cherishes their achievements. 
The men whose names are written upon the 
tablets of this hall fought to save the 
Union and to free the slave. The Union is 
happily secure; in the war against Spain, 
white men of the North and white men of 
the South and sons of freedmen North and 
South, marched to victory side by side under 
the same flag with a common devotion. The 
Union is happily secure; but despite eager 
ambitions and demonstrated capacities, the 
sons of the freedmen, through no fault of 
their own, are, in the higher sense, not yet 
free. There upon the Southern plantation is 
an American black, bound hand and foot by 
ignorance and unthrift; slave to the untutored 
impulse of the present, he is also slave to the 



accumulated impulses of his past; being slave 
to an unillumined self, he is slave to a merciless 
master. For slavery of this type the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation is written in one word 
upon the university seal ; it was spoken cen- 
turies ago by the Teacher of teachers, * * And 
ye shall know the truth and the truth shall 
make you free." 



3477-50 
lot ir 



SEP.. 13 1902 



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